Since starting with replacing bookmarks, I've moved other forms of reference info in there, and now have a whole GTD setup there as well, which is extremely handy since I can search in one place for reference info and personal tasks (past and future). Only downside is I'm dependent on Evernote, but hopefully it manages to stick around in some form for a good while, and if it ever doesn't, I expect I'll be able to migrate to something similar.
I was an Evernote user when I was on macOS. When I switched to Linux, a proper web clipper was something I really missed. I'm now on Joplin and it does everything I used to use Evernote for and then some.
It even has vim bindings now!
As far as longevity goes, I think they got their archive / backup format right - it's just a tarball with markdown in it.
Also people need to move away from those esoteric reactjs, angular, vuejs and plethora of CMS as API or static site generators relying on some js framework which won't last even 2-3 years. Use a static site generator which can generate a plain html, like static site generators built on pandoc, python docutils or similar.
Personally I like restructuredText as the preferred format for content as its a complete specification and plain text. So the only thing in this article I will change is that content can also be in rst format and then generate html from it. Markdown is not a specification as each site implements their own markdown directives unlike restructuredtext specification and most of the parsers and tooling are little different from each other.
I have used rst intensively on a project. A few years later, I would be hard pressed to write anything in ti and would need to start with a Quick Start tutorial. With all its faults, Markdown is simple enough that it can be (and is) used anywhere, so there is no danger of me forgetting its syntax (even if it wasn't much simpler to star with).
So personally I would prefer md over rst anytime.
Not by that name... https://commonmark.org/
If you are in restructuredText world there is one specification and all implementation adhere to it, be it pandoc, sphinx, pelican, nikola. The beauty of it is that it has extension mechanisms which provides enough room for each tool to develop it. But markup can be parsed by any tool.
[1] https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...
It's better than "designed by a committee" standards, but it lacks elegance or maybe craftsmanship.
You don't really get bit by its lack of a standard and extensibility until after you've bought in.
It's essentially designed by the opposite of a committee -- rather than including everything but the kitchen-sink, it contains support for almost no usecases except the one. Which is very appealing, when you only have the one usecase.
So markdown needs to thank the popularity of Wikipedia for its success, as rst did not have any application like Wikipedia. But still rst is used widely enough with its killer Sphinx, readthedocs and now its kind of de-facto documentation writing markup in Python and many open source software world.
Joplin is free and open source.
Joplin is open source, which is a big part of the sell to me. It definitely isn't the best of all possible note taking systems that could ever exist, but it's the best open source one I've found so far, and I don't have time to write a better one at the moment.
> why not build it into browsers. I have seen Firefox and Chrome can download web pages. So it will be nicer if they can download the bookmarked pages and store in a local html, css, image folder. I think it's pretty easy to achieve
This is solving a different problem though. WARC/MHT and other solutions can do this. Joplin is more of a note taking system that allows ingesting content from the web into one's own local notebook, which is relevant to what the GP post was talking about - Evernote.
However, it would seem that "the modern web" is the now popular standard. 10 years ago it might have been Flash or Java web applets or whatever. Now it's JS. I'm not convinced that JS is any better than what it has replaced. However, people keep paying developers to write them, so presumably someone likes them.
> Also people need to move away from those esoteric reactjs, angular, vuejs and plethora of CMS as API or static site generators relying on some js framework which won't last even 2-3 years. Use a static site generator which can generate a plain html, like static site generators built on pandoc, python docutils or similar.
Agreed, but that's also not a problem that Joplin, Evernote, or any other such tool is going to be able to solve. Unless you are complaining that Joplin is an Electron app? That's my biggest issue with it personally. It runs well enough, but is definitely the heaviest application I use regularly, which is a little sad for a note taking program. On the other hand, I haven't found a better open source replacement for _Evernote_. There are lots of other open source note-taking programs though.
> Personally I like restructuredText as the preferred format for content as its a complete specification and plain text. So the only thing in this article I will change is that content can also be in rst format and then generate html from it. Markdown is not a specification as each site implements their own markdown directives unlike restructuredtext specification and most of the parsers and tooling are little different from each other.
reST is indeed very nice. At one point, I kept my personal notes as a Sphinx wiki with everything stored in reST. I found this to be less ergonomic than Evernote/Joplin, although in principle it could do all the same things that Joplin can do, and then some.
Safari does this. pages added to the reading list archive the content for offline reading.
I have used Evernote and OneNote, but have finally, after a long interim period, resorted to using only markdown.
I have a "Notes" root folder and organize section groups and sections in subfolders. VSCode (or Emacs), with some tweaks, shortcuts, and extensions, provides a good-enough markdown editing experience. Like an extension that allows you to paste in images, storing it in a resources folder in the note's current location (yes, I see small problems with this down the road when re-organizing, but nothing that can't be handled).
For Firefox, I use the markdown-clipper extension the few times I would like to copy a whole article, it works well enough. Or I copy/paste what I need; mostly, I take my own summarized notes.
For syncing, I use Nextcloud, which also makes the notes available both for reading and editing on Android and iOS (I use both).
Up until very recently, I used Joplin, which also uses markdown, but there were two things I could not live with: it does not store the markdown files with a readable filename, e.g., its title, and being tied to a specific editor.
If you are mostly clipping and not writing your own notes, I can imagine my setup won't work well, or be very efficient.
I want to use a format that has longevity, and storing in a format that I cannot grep is out of the question.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-clip...
You bookmark in Pinboard or Delicious and ArchiveBox saves the page. Handy.
I had recently participated in a discussion on the problem of forgetting bookmarks[1].
Copying my workflow from there,
1. If the entire content should be easily viewed, then store via pocket extension.
2. If a partial content should be easily viewed i.e. some snippet with link to entire source, then store in notes (Apple).
3. If the content seem useful in the future, but it is okay to forget it; then I store it in the browser bookmarks.
But, my workflow doesn't address the problem raised by Mr. Jeff Huang; if Pocket app or notes disappear so goes my archives. I think self hosted archive as mentioned by the parent is the way to go, but I don't think it's a seamless solution to a common web browser user.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu...
I frequently see something and want to try it out the next time I want to do something else. So I emulate User Agent strings and append lots of "like [common thing I search for a lot]" to the bookmark. When I start typing into the search bar for those other things I'll be reminded of the bookmark.
For example, since file.io is semi-deprecated I decided to try out 0x0.st . But I kept forgetting when I actually needed to transfer a file, so I made a bookmark titled "0x0.st Like file io".
As a side note, I have a similar bash function called mean2use that I use to define aliases that wrap a command and ask me if I'd like to do it another way instead or if I'm sure I want to use the command. I've found this is a nice way to retrain my habits.
Disclaimer: needgap is a problem validation platform I built.
It is true that it is propietary software but it is worth mentioning that all the content can be exported as an .enex file, which is xml.
So, the data can be easily exported.
Have you actually looked at such an xml: https://gist.github.com/evernotegists/6116886
Exported sure, it's all there. But importing that into your new favorite notes application is not going to be trivial, especially not for regular users.
That's why I've decided to stick mostly to regular files in a filesystem.
Joplin, for example, can import notes exported from Evernote. It's just a menu option that even regular users should have no trouble employing.
> Only downside is I'm dependent on Evernote
No special software nor database required.
2. it works with any browser
3. I can move it to any machine and use it
4. It is not transmitted to the browser vendor
5. Being a text file, it is under my control
6. I can back it up
7. I don't need some database manager to access it
8. I can add notes and anything else to the file
9. It's stupid simple
I know about DevonThink, i read good recommendations. But it's IOS/Mac only.
Any Evernote alternative for Win/Android with great search ?
So simple! Thank you!
Edit: doesn't appear to be down, they're just using a self-signed cert.
Indeed.
And I still remember the modem days where I would download entire websites because the ISP charged by the hour, and I'd read them offline to save money.
I think this says something kind of profound about information and capitalism and whatnot.
Or in some random script: "from iridb import iri_index" "data = iri_index.get('https://some/url')" I'm skipping lots, you can ref by hash, url, url+timestamp. It hands back a fh, you dont know if the data you are reffing even fits in memory. Extensive caching, all the iri/url quirks, punycode, PSL etc.
Some random pdf in ~/Downloads, "import doc.pdf" and dmenu pops up, you type a tag, hit enter and the pdf disappears into the hash tree, tagged, and you never need to remember where you put it. Later on you only need to remember part of the tag, and a tag is just a sequence of unicode words.
Chunks are on my github (jakeogh/uhashfs, it's heka-outdated dont use it yet), I'll be posting the full thing sometime soonish.
> SingleFileZ is a fork of SingleFile that allows you to save a webpage as a self-extracting HTML file. This HTML file is also a valid ZIP file which contains the resources (images, fonts, stylesheets and frames) of the saved page.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151229082536/http://blog.bonar...
[2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500239
I need to do a handful of experiments to see exactly how this interacts with Sync, even though I've (foolishly) already synced the important profiles. I'd hope that the cloud copies of the places database just keeps growing, but in any case, I'd rather combine them all offline anyway.
Anyway, thanks for the guide.
It requires Python 3.8 (just the stdlib) and wget.
I have 3633 bookmarks, for a total of 1.5 Go unziped, 1.0 Go zipped (and we know we can get more from better algo and using links to files with the same checksum like for JS and css deps).
This seems acceptable IMO, espacially since I used to consider myself a heavy bookmarker and I was stunned by how few I actually had and how little disk they occupied. Here are the types of the files:
31396 text/plain
3034 application/octet-stream
1316 text/x-c++
1123 text/x-po
865 text/x-python
384 text/html
227 application/gzip
218 inode/x-empty
178 text/x-pascal
113 image/png
44 application/zlib
29 text/x-c
28 text/x-shellscript
14 application/xml
13 application/x-dosexec
12 text/troff
5 text/x-makefile
4 text/x-asm
3 application/zip
2 image/jpeg
2 image/gif
2 application/x-elc
1 text/x-ruby
1 text/x-diff
1 text/rtf
1 image/x-xcf
1 image/x-icon
1 image/svg+xml
1 application/x-shockwave-flash
1 application/x-mach-binary
1 application/x-executable
1 application/x-dbf
1 application/pdf
But it would be fantastic: by doing this experiment I noticed that many bookmarks were 404 now, and I will never get their content back. Beside, searching bookmark, and referencing them is a huge pain.
So definitely something I wish mozilla would consider.
There used to be this neat little extension called Read It Later that let you do just that. Bookmark and save it so you could read it when you were offline or the page disappeared. Later they changed their name and much later Mozilla bought it and added it to Firefox without a way to opt out. It was renamed to Pocket.
Bookmark integration would mean one software, with the same UI, on every platform, and only one listing for your whole archive system.
[0] https://apse.io
That was in 1989 and today I mostly search my computer using find and grep commands, since that's what just keeps working.
This could be done in better and more specialized ways, one problem is browser extension APIs don't provide very good access to the browser's webpage-saving features.
Just pay the yearly subscription so pinboard can cache your bookmarks.
The bus factor is high, but I suspect that Maciej has a plan that'll let us download our archive even if he does get grabbed by the mainland Chinese government let alone a forecasted going out of business action.
I am currently dealing with the problem of parsing large mht files (several megabytes and up). A regular web browser would hang and crash upon opening these files and most ready made tools I could find struggle with the number of embedded images. It's very much a neglected format with very little support in 2019.
Edit: it can also auto-save pages, like SingleFile.
I still keep an old ESR with this plugin for archiving, and accessing MHTs.
It's better than nothing but it's also increasingly frustrating to deal with.
Not useful to me personally, but useful to someone!
Most websites I used to visit during demoscene high days, are now gone.
http://shelve.sourceforge.net/
The main disadvantage was disk space. This is particularly true when some pages are 10 MB or larger. I would periodically prune the archive directory for this reason.
I stopped using Shelve when I started running out of disk space, and now I can't use Shelve because the addon is no longer supported. The author of Shelve has some suggestions for software with similar functionality:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shelve-firefox-addon...
I used Scrapbook in the past (which also still works) but I usually just save random things in ~/webpages/ since (apparently) 2011. The earliest is a copy of the landing page at bigthink.com. Of course now almost every link is broken, excluding social media buttons, About Us, Contact Us, RSS, Privacy, Terms of Use, Login, and the header logo pointing at the same page.
Everyone is free to fork a browser and apply any changes they want. Allowing extensions to change anything at all essentially is the same as forking and merging your changes with upstream every update.
I guess “with a reasonably stable hook api” was supposed to be implicit in my statement.
WARC as a format seems promising, but at least last I checked, open-source tooling to make it a pleasant and/or transparent experience is not really there, and worse, at least as of several months ago, doesn't really seem actively worked on. Definitely an area you'd expect to be further along.
(†): short of direct plist manipulation
The point is to make a webpage that lasts. So people can link to it and get the page. That means making a maintainable webpage and a url that does not change.
It is great that you can archive every page you visit for yourself, but that is not the same as making a lasting web.
Lets make something that others can use too.
(I believe that for historical purposes, enough complaining about ads and tracking will survive that future historians can easily deduce the existence of this practice)
I believe the name for that experience was/is "Microsoft Windows".
I tend to do that, I also save a lot of scientific papers, ebooks and personal notes. I've found that doing so does not help me at all. The main problem I have is that when I need to look something up (an article, a book, a bit of info) I reach for google first, usually end up finding the answer and go to save it, only to find that I had already found the answer beforehand (and perhaps already made clarifying notes to go along with it) and then forgot about it.
This, and not dead links, is the fundamental problem with bookmarks for me. Not only bookmarks, it extends to my physical notes and pretty much everything I do. If I haven't actively worked on something for a couple of months, I forget all about it and when I come back to it I usually have to start from scratch until I (hopefully) refresh my memory. Some of it is also usually outdated information.
I think this is a big, unsolved problem and I'm not even sure how to go about starting to solve it. I can envision some form of AI-powered research assistant, but only in abstract terms. I can't envision how it would actually work to make my life better or easier. It would need to be something that would help blur the line between things I know and things that are on my computer somehow. If I think of my brain like it has RAM and cache, things I'm working on right now are in the cache and things I've worked on recently or work on a lot are in RAM, but what's for me lacking is a way to easily move knowledge from my brain-RAM to long term storage and then move that knowledge back into working memory faster than I can do so now. I'm not even talking about brain uploading or mind-machine interfaces, but just something that can remind me of things I already know but forgot about faster than I can do so by myself.
I am convinced that figuring out how to do this will lead to the next leap in technological development speed and efficiency. Not quite the singularity that transhumanists like to talk about, but a substantial advancement.
What I've found is that I need to spend more time deciding what is important, and less time consuming frivolous information. That's hardly a technology problem.
For things I really don't want to forget, I'm using Anki [0], a Spaced Repetition System (SRS). Anki is supremely good at knowing when you're about to forget an item and prompting you to review it.
Spaced practice and retrieval practice, both of which are used in SRS, are two learning techniques for which there is ample evidence that they actually work [1].
You still need to decide what is worth remembering, but that's something technology can't help with, I think.
There are a few issues to consider:
- Any comprehensive archive of your activity is itself going to be a tremendously "interesting" resource for others -- advertisers, law enforcement, business adversaries, and the like. Baking in strong crypto and privacy protections from the start would be exceedingly strongly advised.
- That's also an excellent reason to have this outside the browser, by default, or otherwise sandboxed.
- Back when I was foolish enough to think that making suggestions to Browser Monopoly #1 was remotely useful, I pointed out that the ability to search within the set of pages I currently have open or have visited would be immensely useful. It's (generally) a smaller set than the entire Web, and comprises a set of at least putatively known, familiar, and/or vetted references. I may as well have been writing in Linear A.
- Context of references matters a lot to me. A reason I have a huge number of tabs open, in Firefox, using Tree-Style Tabs, is that the arrangement and relationships between tabs (and windows) is itself significant information. This is of course entirely lost in traditional bookmarks.
- A classification language for categorising documents would be useful. I've been looking at various of these, including the Library of Congress Subject Headings. A way of automatically mapping 1-6 high-probability subjects to a given reference would be good, as well as, of course, tools for mapping between these.
- I've an increasing difference of opinion with the Internet Archive over both the utility and ultimately advisability of saving Web content in precisely the format originally published. Often this is fragile and idiosyncratic. Upconverting to a standardised representation -- say, a strictly semantic, minimal-complexity HTML5, Markdown, or LaTeX, is often superior. Both have their place.
On that last, I've been continuing to play with the suggestion a few days ago for a simplified Washington Post article scrubber, and now have a suite of simple scripts which read both WashPo articles and the homepage, fetching links from the homepage for local viewing. These tend to reduce the total page size to about 3-5% of the original, are easier to read than the source, and are much more robust.
I'm reading HN at the moment from w3m (which means I've got vim as my comment editor, yay!), and have found that passing the source to pandoc and regenerating HTML from that (scrubbing some elements) is actually much preferable, for the homepage. Discussion pages are ... more difficult to process, and the default view in w3m is unpleasant, though vaguely usable.
Upshot: saving a WARC strictly for archival purposes is probably useful, but generating useful formats as noted above would be generally preferable in addition.
With the increasing untenability of mainstream Web design and practices, a Rococco catastrophe of mainstream browsers, the emergence of lightweight and alternative browsers and user-agents (though many based on mainstream rendering engines), the tyranny of the minimum viable user attacking any level of online informational access beyond simple push-stream based consumption, and more, it seems that at the very least there's a strongly favourable environment to rethinking what the Web is and what access methods it should support. Peaks in technological complexity tend to lead to a recapitulation phase in which former, simpler, ideas are resurrected, returned to, and become the basis of further development.
Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic.
[1] https://github.com/machawk1/warcreate
[2] https://github.com/machawk1/wail
[3] https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox
EDIT: I forgot to mention https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder (the best general purpose web recorder application I have used during my previous research into archiving personal web usage)